"I was an asshole of a child. Particularly an asshole of a pre-teen. Not in any kind of violent or angry way, more of a spoiled, comfortable middle class white girl asshole in which I stomped around the house and slammed doors when I was angry or languished on the floor of the living room dramatically whining, "I'mmmm boooooored!" I was quite unaware of how good I had it. It was during one of these floor whining sessions between being bored by television and bored by suburban Michigan that my dad, having had enough of my whining for the day, towered over me and tossed two books onto my chest. "You're bored? Read that." It appealed almost immediately to my trained-on-talking-animal-Disney-movies aesthetic but also had an air of forbidden adult mystery in the haunting imagery on the covers. I had seen and known what a swastika was when Carly Silverstein broke down crying in the hallway after someone had carved one on her locker. Even to myself I thought, "Am I old enough for this?" Reading Maus by Art Spiegelman at 13 or so was a punch in the stomach. Having only consumed a steady diet of Archie, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Misty comics I had never known the medium was capable of telling stories like this. I remember spending time with a particular panel depicting a hanging execution, the illustrated faces expressive with bulging eyes and the bodies stripped naked and shivering. It ushered me quietly into the world of adults where bad things happened to good people. I had been aware that that sort of thing was known to happen but I had never really understood it until I read Maus."
"In the age of computers, many designers have lost sight of how important typography is within a design. This book, The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst, is such a great reference book. It has taught me so much about the history and proper use of typography. I keep this on my work desk and often reference it. Just the other day I looked up the proper usage of asterisks and daggers, and then spend another 10 minutes learning the history of a dagger and other ways you can use it in typography. Every time I open this book up to learn one thing, I walk away with another tidbit of typographic knowledge. This keeps me growing as a designer and continuously being aware of all the little details."
"My senior year of high school, I took a class where, among other things, we had the complete freedom to choose how and what we wanted to write about the things we read. One of the books that we read was “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. It’s a compilation of stories about Vietnam that is based upon the author’s own experiences. What struck me most about this book was the way that it played with narrative and personal “truth,” challenging my own conceptions of historical narrative and the truth in fiction writing. It taught me to trust my own interpretations of literature as being valid, and allowed me to start on a path of continually pushing myself to think and write critically about the things I read."
